Chapter 7: Ka Initiation
Although Roland and Joey both argued against it, Yori's stubbornness won out in the end, and she climbed into a pod. The virtual world dumped her into a very ordinary-looking room, which emptied into an ordinary-looking meadow—just a long stretch of green rolling hills and fluffy clouds, like some European countryside vacation.
She'd ordered Zigfried to send her to Seto, and although he'd muttered about system maintenance, he'd said he could do it. So much for that; Yori didn't see Seto in any direction. Just patches of wildflowers and a strangely dead feeling in the air when she thought surely the grass should have drifted in a breeze.
She took two steps forward in the grass, and then the ground sank beneath her feet like a bog. With barely a moment to yelp, she fell through a melting landscape.
And she landed in a familiar alley.
Yori breathed heavily, veins flooded with adrenaline and anger. Her knuckles stung from where she'd split another girl's lip. Haku stepped forward and rested his hand on her shoulder in a comforting, familiar way, immediately calming some of the emotion inside. It was all a misunderstanding. He wouldn't actually have battled a kid, wouldn't have sacrificed that girl to a cobra bite or worse.
But even as she had the thought, Yori's elbow ached with remembered pain from her own snake bite.
Haku craned his neck, peering into the street.
"Is she gone?" he asked.
Yori turned to look.
And just as she did, she felt a flash of jagged, scorching pain through her back. She felt the knife, unnatural and hard, piercing her soft skin and muscles, an invader her body couldn't make sense of. Her agonized scream cut into silence as something inside burst, something vital collapsed. She thought it might have been her soul.
Her boyfriend had stabbed her. Just because she'd protected a kid. Just because she'd stopped him from playing a game.
"I don't take betrayal lightly," Haku said, holding her upright as she sagged. Pain continued to spasm through her body, and she gasped for a breath she couldn't catch. "But I could have killed you. Remember that."
He released her, and Yori dropped to the sidewalk, almost passing out at the impact. Her vision swam black. She grasped feebly toward her shoulder but couldn't reach the knife still embedded in her back.
"Consider this our tragic breakup," said Haku, stepping over her. "So long, pet."
Yori gave a silent scream that wouldn't emerge past her throat. An awareness buzzed at the edge of her senses—the knowledge that she'd already relived this memory a thousand times in the shadows, screaming herself hoarse, feeling that knife over and over and over.
NO MORE.
With a wrenching sensation, she separated herself from the memory. Her bracelet flared with heat, scorching against her skin, and it burned away the pain in her back along with the street and every echo of Haku.
She was back in the meadow. Back amongst dead air and artificial sunlight on the grass.
For good measure, she screamed at the sky—not the agony-filled shriek of before but just a shout of rage that lit something in her bones and felt good to release.
"Satisfied?" said a voice behind her.
She turned, expecting Seto. But it wasn't him. The boy she faced was a similar height and age, still familiar, wearing a black-and-red uniform with rolled sleeves and a red sash at his waist. His black hair swooped to the side, away from his shaved temple and the mystical tattoos there. His crimson eyes met hers, unnerving with their dragon-slit pupils.
"Dante?" she choked out. He'd never spoken before. Shada had implied that Ka couldn't speak, that they were only the shadow of the human soul. A voice belonged to the human side.
Dante leaned casually on his staff. "You're the one who summoned me. Needed a shield for your mind in this . . . place." He swept his gaze across the meadow, his nose wrinkled slightly as if he had an aversion to wildflowers. Perhaps he would have preferred an ashen landscape. Yori didn't know what dragons liked.
Was he a dragon?
Joey's voice returned in her mind. How come your dragon's also a magician dude that ain't you? You got two extra souls in there?
She hadn't addressed that because she'd had no answer to give. When Shada had shown her his Ka, it had only been a monster, no human form, and when she'd summoned Dante as a dragon the first two times, she hadn't thought twice. Then he'd transformed to his spellcaster form.
Now he spoke.
"Are you actually my Ka?" she asked.
"You don't waste time. You never have." Dante smiled, a faint expression. The timbre of his baritone voice stirred her memory; she'd heard it before. Not recently. In her past life.
She closed her eyes, opening her mind to the memory. Everything she'd gleaned about her past life thus far had been patchy—bare snippets of moments, sometimes so removed from context that she couldn't even make sense of them. But she was certain she'd seen Dante before. Not in his black uniform but in the white wrap of an initiate priest, set apart from other initiates by the red sash he never removed. And by one other thing.
Even as a priest in training, his tattoos had been the same, and she remembered others in the palace shying away from the marks, whispering about unnatural magic.
"In Egypt, you were a—" Her voice strangled as she opened her eyes to find him directly in front of her. She leapt back a step, halfway to reaching for her knife.
"Relax." Dante's faint smile remained, and he pointed down at her belt. His staff had vanished from his hands. "I want to see the cards."
"What ca . . ." Face burning, she yanked out her deck, handing him Dante the Fire Dragon and Magician's Release. As if he could have meant anything else.
With a nod of thanks, he stepped away, one card in each hand, wrinkles furrowing his brow as he scrutinized the artwork. His appearance perfectly matched the illustration on Magician's Release. And the red sash tying the waist of his uniform perfectly matched Yori's memory of a priest in training.
She tried desperately to remember something else, but it wouldn't come. All she could conjure was a boy in the palace, blending into a dozen other initiates. Just one more person issuing orders for her to follow.
How did he wind up as her Ka? Yori's life had always been strange, but between Millennium-Item magic and past-life nonsense, she was starting to feel completely removed from reality, like she was the ugly duckling in the story, except instead of being some beautiful swan, she was actually a really cranky alligator, and if things didn't start making sense soon, she was bound to start eating people.
She glared up at the sky, sending a message no one would hear: Shada, you left some important things out.
Of course, she'd barely had time to learn the basics. She'd been actively dying. The worst kind of timer. Perhaps Shada would have told her a hundred additional things if given the chance. Perhaps she could meet up with him again somehow.
But right now, she had a friend to save.
"I need to find Seto." It was something grounding to focus on.
"I can't help with that," said Dante without looking up. "I don't have the Millennium Ring. Or a map to KaibaCorp."
Considering the memories of Egypt, she wasn't surprised to hear him mention the items, but KaibaCorp was another matter entirely. "How do you know Seto's company?"
He finally met her gaze, tilting his head as if in thought. "Some things I know about the world. Some I don't. I'm still waking up." He held up the card for Dante the Fire Dragon. "For example, I know this isn't my real name, but I can't remember what it is."
Yori's cheeks heated. She hadn't thought to question his name, but now that he'd pointed it out, Dante didn't exactly scream Ancient Egypt.
"Khalid?" she offered. "Jabari? Mahad?"
No, that last one rang true for someone else.
Dante must have thought the same, because the skin around his eyes tightened, and he spoke with grief in his voice. "Mahad was my mentor. My brother beyond blood."
His words served as the spark, and Yori's memory caught fire with the knowledge of High Priest Mahad. She could picture him standing in the priest's courtyard, tall and slender, his brown hair shadowing his eyes and hanging past his shoulders. Of all the high priests, he spent the most time around Yami, like a self-appointed royal bodyguard. Along with her memory came a distinct twinge of annoyance and the sense that Mahad was her primary obstacle to stealing private moments with the pharaoh.
She tried to remember the other priests but came up blank. It seemed her past memory needed specific triggers to return.
"You can't be my Ka." Yori couldn't think of anything else to say.
"I'm awake enough to know that I am." Dante returned her cards, his eyebrow raised in challenge. "I'm not the original, that's true enough, but I volunteered for the job. Give me a while, and I might even be able to tell you why."
Not the original. Yori's heart thumped with extra force. "I lost my original Ka?"
Shada's voice rang in her mind. Very few people can survive the loss of their Ka.
He'd avoided looking at her when he'd said that, and she'd assumed it was simply a heavy topic. Apparently he was prone to secret keeping, just like his son. She would wring his neck when she saw him again.
Dante grimaced. "Lost? No, I wouldn't say that. Stolen. Taken. Unjustly and brutally murdered, maybe."
Yori mirrored his earlier eyebrow raise.
He scraped one boot on the ground, stirring grass that was otherwise still. He rubbed the back of his neck. "I didn't approve of all the priestly practices in court. Neither did Mahad. Anyway, the truth is, whenever a new slave was purchased for the palace, they had their Kas drawn out, severed, and trapped in stone. The same was done for minor thieves and petty criminals. Supposedly, the process removed the evil from people's hearts. For slaves, it was so they would never betray their masters."
With a sigh, he lifted his eyes. "Mahad thought there was another reason for the Ka sealings, but I can't remember . . ." Dante's voice trailed off, and his crimson eyes glazed. For a moment, his tattoos flickered with a deep orange glow, like a forge stirring to life. Then it calmed and dimmed. He pursed his lips, clearly frustrated.
"Trouble with your memory." Yori clucked her tongue. "I think we've all got that issue."
"This may not be a memory problem. It's possible Mahad never told me his full suspicions. He was a cautious magician."
"Priest, you mean?"
"That too." With a flourish, Dante's staff reappeared in his hand, the red garnet pulsing with light. "Some of us had strong enough heka we weren't just priests. We were magicians—a grand order you wouldn't know anything about." He bit his lip, one eye closing in a wince as his smugness deflated. He lowered his staff. "Sorry. There's part of me that still looks down on you as a slave."
"Offense taken," Yori said flatly. Despite her words, she couldn't help but like Dante. She'd entrusted her fate to him a hundred times when he was just a card in her deck. It seemed pointless to break that trust now.
With a downcast expression, Dante lowered himself to one knee, planting his staff in the virtual grass before him. "I give my deepest apologies for the offense, mistress. Solemnly, I vow to reform my attitudes in—"
"I was kidding." Yori gently kicked the base of his staff. "And don't get stuffy on me, magician-priest. I much prefer it when you talk the normal way."
Glancing up, he shot her a happy smirk, red eyes glinting. He bounced to his feet. "Say no more. Let's find KaibaCorp."
She laughed. "Seto Kaiba."
"Same thing."
Seto himself might agree with that, actually. Yori rolled her eyes. She turned to face the open landscape and found it just as empty as before. Even the clouds hung eerily motionless in the blue sky. Trudging across endless hills seemed like a pointless strategy, and besides that, Zigfried's struggles seemed to mean someone inside the system was actively directing it, so they would probably steer her in a continuous wrong direction—keep her walking endlessly and never finding a thing. In a world where nothing was real, they could invent anything. No limit to the obstacles.
But in a world where nothing was real, those perceived obstacles meant nothing. They could be removed.
Yori licked her lips, considering. Her bracelet clearly had power here. It had protected her mind, summoned Dante. And while it couldn't find like Ryou's ring, it could connect her to a soul. That was how it let her see Yami when no one else could.
She closed her eyes and pictured Seto as he'd been the last time she'd seen him. She remembered entering the Duel Tower, shouldering her way through Joey and the others until she reached the lone figure at the back of the hall, standing rigid as a statue. His blue eyes seemed darker in the shadows, and his jaw hung slack, his lips parted but not speaking. He looked at her like she was the only thing that existed in the world.
She remembered the slight hoarseness to his voice as he said, It seems you came at the perfect moment.
Just like she had on the docks. Pretty soon, she was going to have to start charging the billionaire for her life-saving services.
One more rescue, she thought. Coming right up.
As if her bracelet were a hound dog in need of a scent, she fed it the memory of Seto, and then she reached out with its power, searching for the soul that matched the memory.
She'd expected it to be difficult, but awareness blazed at once, like a lighthouse over a black ocean. Catching hold, she yanked, though she couldn't tell if she was pulling Seto to herself or pulling herself to him.
When she opened her eyes, she was still in the meadow, but Seto stood with her—towered over her, more like, since he was such a giraffe. She grinned in triumph while he just shook his head, blue eyes glazed with confusion.
Then they narrowed down at her.
"What are you happy about, slave?" he demanded.
Yori snorted. "Excuse me?"
Off to her side, Dante gave a small hum. "It's not just me. That makes me feel better. And worse, somehow."
Seto's gaze darted to the magician, then back to Yori. He blinked and staggered back a step. She could tell the moment something awoke inside him, softening the hard edges of his expression.
"Yori." His voice cracked. He cleared his throat to cover it. "How are you . . . What are you doing here? Am I still . . ."
It was rare to see Seto lacking composure. Usually, he kept up a social mask with twice the refinement of Yori's own, displaying only what he allowed anyone to see. At the moment, the mask wasn't cracked so much as entirely shattered. Seto's blue eyes held a distinct light of panic, darting wildly around the meadow as if searching for threats that couldn't be seen, and though he clenched his jaw, it was not with strength. More with desperation, like he needed the force to hold himself together. He'd clearly run his hands through his hair more than once, and his bangs hung limply in his eyes.
He was frazzled.
"He's done a number on you, hasn't he?" Yori said softly.
It made her think of being trapped with a monster in the darkness.
"I—" Before Seto could say anything else, the ground opened beneath him. Yori made a grab for his hand, but her fingers closed over empty air, and Seto vanished.
"Dante," she said sharply.
Her Ka leapt to her side, staff glowing red, his black pupils narrowed to minuscule slits drowning in crimson.
"When I draw him back again," Yori said, "I need you to protect him like you protected me."
At that, the magician grimaced, the glow of his staff fading. "I'm not his Ka, mistress. Some of my magic is still effective in this strange world, but I can't shield his soul. We don't share a connection."
Yori cursed. She ran a hand through her hair, wincing as her fingers caught in a few tangles. Things had been nonstop in Battle City, and she could use a long night's sleep, a good meal, a shirt with long sleeves . . . the list went on. But the list would have to wait.
"Don't call me mistress," she said distractedly. "It's weird. Okay, his Ka. I need to summon his Ka. Can I do that?" Shada had only spoken about summoning her own Ka, not someone else's.
"Yes," said Dante.
Yori blinked at the quick, confident answer. "Oh. Well . . . good. Definitive."
He smirked at her.
"Shut up." She took a swipe at him. "I'm new at this!"
"And you're doing a wonderful job, little goose."
"What is that?" Despite herself, she laughed. "Don't call me that!"
"Because the goose leaps in and learns to swim. It's a compliment!"
"It's condescending!"
"But you ordered me not to call you mistress."
"Because it's weird. And don't say I ordered you. That's weird too. I'm not a slave and neither are you. It's a new world, Dante." She shook her head. "Anyway, shut up. Stand over there and let me concentrate."
With a greatly exaggerated shrug, the magician slunk away, threshing his staff through the long grass and leaving flattened patterns in his wake.
"Yori," he said over his shoulder, pausing until he caught her smile. He answered with a grim one of his own. "Be careful. Using an item is like charming a snake. At the smallest slip in control, the fangs will turn on you."
For a moment, Yori thought of a golden-eyed boy and the snake he wore around his neck. The twin scars near her elbow burned with remembered pain, and the ground wavered at her feet before she solidified her focus.
"I'm aware." But she didn't really have a choice. And she had to practice wielding these fangs if she ever wanted to turn them against the true snake charmer.
She closed her eyes and reached into the dark.
Seth recognized the bracelet's power. Annoyance though he was, Shada held a special place among the high priests, and even Seth had been excited to train with the man—at least in the beginning.
On the one-year anniversary of receiving the Millennium Rod, Seth was turned over to Shada for Ka training.
They had a small courtyard to themselves. Slaves had transported in two stone tablets from the Temple of Wadjet, each as tall as a man, each engraved with the gruesome depiction of a monster. The sun beamed brightly overhead, and while Shada cast aside his outer robe to stand bare-armed in a plain white tunic and wrap, Seth maintained his full priestly attire.
"Don't be so stiff, Seth." The bald man grinned. "This is the most fun you'll have as a priest."
At a gesture from Shada, a slave girl near Seth's age scurried forward to gather the priest's discarded robe.
"Thank you, Yaara," said Shada absently. He always did that—paid courtesy to slaves and other lowlifes. Seth ignored the girl with pointed focus.
"Let's begin," he said impatiently, turning the Millennium Rod in his hands.
"Very well. A demonstration first."
Shada stood before the stone tablets, feet planted resolutely. He lifted the arm bearing the Millennium Bracelet, and even in full sunlight, it carried a hazy glow. The priest's expression grew severe, sharpened further by the line of black tattoos he carried across his forehead. Akhenaden found tattoos demeaning for a high priest, but though Seth would never admit it, he envied Shada's. They were a highly stylized hieratic text, more jagged lines than legible hieroglyphs, impossible for anyone to read unless they knew the meaning.
Justice was the meaning.
Movement rippled across the tablets. Colors bled through sandy stone, bringing to life the images frozen within. A low growl echoed through the courtyard as the first monster clawed its way free, stepping forward and leaving an empty tablet behind. It was humanoid but at least three times Seth's size, with stumpy legs and dragging forearms, its square face warped around short tusks and deep black eyes.
The next monster burst free with a lithe grace, catlike and even larger than the first, with black fur striped green. Its roar shook the palace walls and rattled Seth's knees. He grinned.
"At my command"—Shada turned his wrist, displaying the bracelet—"they will defend or attack with a power far exceeding my own. However, each wound they receive will be felt as a wound on me. Should they be killed, it will endanger my life as well. Are you prepared to wield such a power, Seth?"
Ka monsters. They were the domain of the Millennium Bracelet. Before any other Millennium Item user could summon or command a Ka, even their own, they had to be initiated by the bracelet.
"I'm ready," said Seth.
Shada lifted one slim eyebrow. "Even now, you can refuse. Not every priest finds it necessary to—"
"I said I'm ready."
Still clutching the rod with one hand, Seth stepped closer to the bald high priest, using his other hand to pry off his left shoulder guard. The gold decorative piece rang sharply as it dropped to the stones at Seth's feet. He pulled the fabric of his blue tunic back to his neck, leaving his shoulder bare, and he waited.
After searching his eyes, Shada gave a decisive nod.
He lifted the bracelet. What had been a hazy glow was now nearly blinding, the metal appearing to warp and ripple as it moved through the air, as if it were only an illusion. When it neared Seth's skin, he felt the oncoming heat, like he was flying into the sun itself.
He stood unmoving, never averting his gaze.
The metal contacted his shoulder, pouring liquid fire across his skin. The fire surged through his chest and down his arm, pooling in his fingertips as they twitched violently. Clenching his teeth, he restrained anything beyond an agonized grunt. Each second extended into eternity.
Then Shada withdrew the bracelet. Air washed over Seth's shoulder with cool relief. The mark of the bracelet—an imprint of the Eye of Horus—began to fade immediately, but the pain lingered, a prickle deep within his skin. The mark would not vanish entirely; it would remain like a shadow, appearing whenever Seth summoned a Ka.
Though he kept his teeth clenched, he smiled over them. Rolling his shoulders, he replaced his shoulder guard, then stepped toward the tablets. The monsters had vanished, reappearing as carvings in stone. The next time they emerged, it would be Seth's doing.
Shada stood next to him, facing the tablets. "We begin with severed Kas because it is harder to isolate the monster within your own soul. These are already isolated, and therefore, easier to grasp. Imagine your heka as a leash; use it to take hold of the creature. Bind it to you. Pull."
Seth did as directed. Familiar warmth coursed through his veins, the surging of the magic within, and he bound himself to the left-hand tablet. Though nothing was visible in the air, he could sense the fastened leash.
He yanked.
For a moment, he met resistance. Then the bond snapped like a frayed rope, and he tumbled backward, landing hard against the stones.
The slave girl laughed—just a puff of sound quickly concealed. Seth shot her a murderous glare, but she'd already lowered her eyes meekly to the ground.
"Again," said Shada with his own chuckle. "No one gets it the first time. Or even the fifth."
Seth was not just anyone. He was the youngest priest ever appointed, a prodigy among the elite. With a snarl, he shoved himself to his feet, dusted off his backside, and focused once more on the tablet.
On his third attempt, a clawed hand burst from the stone, and a growl rumbled through the courtyard.
Just as Seth felt a surge of triumph, he also felt a jolt, ripping him from his surroundings. He hissed, clamping one hand to his left shoulder as it burned.
Seto Kaiba blinked, dazed, as the burning in his arm faded. He stood in an unfamiliar meadow of long, flower-speckled grass.
At his feet was a white cat, curled into a ball.
"What . . ." He blinked, slowly shaking his head.
"Yes!" Yori whooped, charging toward him through the long grass, her red hair vibrant in the sunlight. "Did you see that, Dante?"
"I knew you could swim, little goose."
She snapped back at the unknown man, but Seto's attention had been drawn to the cat, which was not a cat at all, despite his first assumption.
It was a tiny, sleeping dragon. Rather than fur, her white coloring came from armored plates which glistened faintly with a rainbow sheen. Dainty wings marked her back, tucked tightly against her body, which puffed with each long inhale. One clawed foreleg covered her face as if shielding it from the light.
Yori came to a stop on the other side of the creature, and when Seto stared at her with all the silent questions he couldn't yet manage, she merely shrugged.
"Meet your Ka," she said. "I think it's a Blue-Eyes."
Note: Man, it's good to be back. I will die on the hill that is Yugioh because this fandom has my soul. Hope you're keeping well, friends.